I posted a question a while back questioning why After Effects drive-by installs Cinema 4D without warning, and they just could not understand why the lack of notification or consent was a problem, feeling strongly that I should shut up and be grateful even the tiniest of blessings our lords and masters at Adobe see fit to bestow upon our hard drives.
Which then furthers the question, why? I could understand the odd person just trying to be helpful because they had the same problem, found the post with no solution, figured it out, then answered with theirs, but for the ones who seem to spend countless hours ranking up, either by gaming it, or the few actually being helpful, does it lead to a chance of being hired or something?
Creating a system like that almost feels like it should be illegal, almost like the companies that give extensive case studies for interviews and take the work with no intention of hiring the interviewees, or unpaid internships where they don't even bother teaching and just give grunt work.
So, here I am, stuck between two idiotic bureaucracies with no way to resolve the problem on either side. Google doesn't answer to anything, the bank is - at least on paper, I've managed to stretch this for three years now - unwilling to bend their rules because the amounts are so tiny. But you can see the ghost of what I'm worried about: you'll see that if that card eventually does get cancelled that that $0.49 or whatever is a reason to lock my account or some other idiotic move.
Simple doesn't mean easy, practical, realistic, suitable, or many other things.
Simple doesn't mean good.
I had a weird experience with a bank where they seemed to re-open my account after it was closed. I got a letter (as requested) within the 15 day window stating the account was closed and I wouldn't be responsible for any fees on the account in the event it opened again.
They spent most of the 15 days bombarding me with calls and emails trying to resolve it outside the CFPB, but I wanted it on record. That letter is now a PDF attached to the complaint with a complaint ID in case I have problems.
Hence the common recommendation to start spamming [email protected] addresses until you annoy someone internal who is willing to file a ticket on your behalf if you don't have any capable Googlers in your social graph.
Considering through the amount of times that someone said "did you try turning it off and on again?" AND it has has solved the problem, make such forum users/helpers like that very useful.
(looks like they got acquired and had some big companies using them so google using something similar I imagine: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/css-corp-acquires-s...)
Often these purported super users reply with silly generic suggestions, or meaningless requests for information. There's nothing worse than posting highly specific debugging information to a forum, which is not read by engineers, and is instead replied to by someone suggesting you try logging out and in again.
For example, in this thread, "Device", "Drive for desktop version", and "Sync mode" isn't remotely relevant to restoring user files. And the super user cannot do anything with that information. If that information is truly necessary, a Google engineer can post in the thread requesting it.
And they do it all for a meaningless diamond badge. You may as well have AI doing it.
This exactly, it's the most frustrating thing ever as a user, and makes me wonder what the point of these forums even is.
That being said, I understand what the Google Drive team is going through here & as long as they are aware, the support threads aren't going to be useful until they root cause the issue & hopefully fix what happened.
Some of them get invited to Product Expert Summits too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/9vqyf0/attended_the...
I don't deny that AI could take over that role soon
They “gamify” volunteer support with badges etc.
One place I worked called it “Level 0” support in that it cost the company zero dollars.
Should Google be paying more to provide customer service? Absolutely! But it’s just not in Google’s culture to do customer service. Google likes to develop products with extremely lean / efficient burn rates. Googlers value efficiency orders of magnitude more than human connection.
My guess is it's the same motivation for those who volunteer to help others in any other support forum. Human nature does not change based on the market cap of the company (if any) behind the product. What difference do you expect between this, and Stack Overflow contributors for Microsoft SQL Server or Blender? I wouldn't expect there to be a difference in motivation: some people simply enjoy helping others (even if it's in return of made-up internet points).
On the paying tiers of FAANG-like, Is crazy that these companies charge market price for their services yet the support is usually quite poor.
Finding good support is also hard. I worked in product areas with dedicated support for paying customers, and the number of support staff that I would consider actually helpful is precisely 3 people, out of a few hundred. Those 3 people are paid a ton to keep them around, and while I don't know exactly what they're paid they usually get moved up and into a role that at minimum exceeds typical senior eng pay, the rest just bounce tickets back and forth collecting traces with at best a poor understanding of the product. On average no understanding.
Another problem is that a good support staff would probably do better to be a dev anyway, the knowledge required is pretty much the same, just missing development experience.
On the bad side I can think of Google and Databricks.
So it's not an unsolvable problem, there are people getting support right.
I've had experiences where they will claim that something is possible when it is absolutely not, and you have to provide a lot of supporting information to get them to see reality.
knowing code quality levels at those companies and how they replace actual designers with PMs... it was their goal to have the most expensive support!
Called Walmart and they got extra bike racks installed at my location. Have had to call eBay a number of times as a small-time seller. PayPal too. Got Google to replace my chromecast remote and they went through thorough troubleshooting steps before RMAing it.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions but not worth pretending that paid (by the vendor) support doesn’t exist.
The outcome is support that makes you feel like you're bothering them, is barely concealing their hostility, lies about what's happening, and one wrong word and horrible, horrible things will happen to you.
That's PayPal support on the best of days, like after the support person just received a 20% raise, or had a baby. On the bad days...
<Flips through calendar>
- "Sorry, I'll get my new dishwasher then"
Surely the company must provide customer service for advertisers. Perhaps it's excellent.
Not sure that people using Google Drive for free are customers. They are potential ad targets and potential sources of data useful for an online ad services business, though.
Not really. Google is a monopoly with a huge moat, so pretty much everything they do is pretty shit. (But yeah, for actual Google customers there's actually some sort of customer support.)
I was confused why someone had wasted their time doing this, so I snooped around a bit. As far as I can tell it's a CV building exercise for some people and nothing more.
I can help you find out information about why people staff customer support forums for free.
Please follow the instructions first here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428901
A page ( https://github.com/pricing , I am a verified teacher, what happens if I already subscribed to co-pilot ) clearly tells me to contact support. I've decided it's simply impossible to contact anyone at github, every attempt just leads to an automated reply and my post being closed. I'm not sure there is anyone there. I tried posting ont he help forum, where I (of course) never got a reply.
This has made me make sure nothing I care about is only on github -- as I don't expect to any recieve any help if I have any other problems in future. I should of course be careful anyway, but when you hit these problems you realise quite how hard it is to contact any modern large company.
Maybe someone from MSFT/GitHub can help
I’ve contacted them many times in the past (before MS acquisition), and every time I got a non-template response from a human being within a few hours, sometimes within half an hour. Example request: pushed something I later regretted, asked them to gc on the server and purge cached pages; I asked this a couple of times and had it promptly taken care of each time.
Like why not Dropbox or Sync?
And for personal use, it's much cheaper than Dropbox.
I pay R$6.99/month for 100GB of Google storage (most of which is used by Google Photos), while Dropbox costs R$10/month for 50GB of storage and doesn't integrate very well with Google Photos.
I sent in a tech support request, and it was solved in less than 2 hours. They even replied, telling me they added my institutional e-mail domain.
So not only did a human reply and fix my problem, I'm not even a paying customer. I get the free education account.
Not all companies miss this, Amazon has strict SLAs on responding to user requests, and this even includes GitHub issues. Personally, I find it rare, though not non-existent, to have a good experience with Google customer support or OSS while Amazon generally feels pretty good. Maybe just lucky of course but the brand effect is obvious to me and perhaps worth the companies spending a bit on.
Google support is also poorly trained on social engineering.
Not sure how much you're following financial news these days, but trillion dollar companies are getting outright massacred on Wall Street if they dare spend money on things deemed "unnecessary" by the bankers.
Customer support organizations were the ones most targeted and hit by layoffs across the board to cut costs. After all, Google products are still being used after they fired large amount of support staff (not that support experience was good with them). It's a good example for other corporations to do the same - it's not like you'll go elsewhere, riiiight? Time to "cut the fat" (term I've seen on HN).
(And that doesn't include internal pressures in these corporations to avoid unpromoteable, unsexy, expensive and boring work of supporting customers.)
How do you think the became a trillion dollar company????!!!
There. I said the quiet part outloud.
Where a competitive marketplace exists I don't see ads (especially ads purchased by big incumbent vendors) adding any value: it would be better overall if competitors spent that money improving the product (or service) rather than trying to persuade customers to purchase a less-good product (measuring "good" as value/cost, since there is a place for lower quality but lower cost options).
But I do think there might be an economic argument in favour of at least some advertising to bring awareness of new market entrants, and especially of new categories of product/service. (One counterargument might be that this should properly be the role of journalists, and I agree that in an ideal world it would be. But the current dismal quality of the mainstream media suggests that economic incentives may actively hinder having ideal journalism…)
If this means people see fewer ads, then that's a great way to reduce over-consumption.
Although I'm not in favour of completely banning advertisements, just taxing advertising revenue heavily, as it sidesteps any censorship accusations. The government still lets you say what you want, but you can't become wealthy just by shilling for corpos.
Exceptions will be made in the name of encouraging viable consumer evaluation content, such as review copies, listing fees and suchlike as long as they are clearly stated and meet a stringent set of requirements.
Even for pretty bad things (e.g. really toxic pollution), the taxes just need to be set obnoxiously high. By "obnoxiously high," I mean the trade-off might be cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch or removing a billion tons of CO2; something which clearly helps more than the harm done.
For mild things (e.g. device shitification or not having service manuals), even very modest taxes can help (e.g. a few pennies per device), without throttling innovation. In a commodity market of Chinese off-brands, a few pennies is enough to make-or-break a vendor.
That's the standard argument made: Consumers learn about new products through advertising.
In fact, this is not what happens. At least I've virtually never seen it. The most effective ways to learn about new products are things like trade journals (including ones like Hacker News), blogs, etc. In those contexts, writers select for products which are interesting or which work well.
To the contrary, advertising strongly favors entrenched players with money:
- If Microsoft builds a SaaS, you build a better SaaS, but you have $50k to advertise, and Microsoft has $500M, there will be a gap in consumer perception, in favor of the inferior player.
- If I know, from advertising, that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, and Microsoft has additional generic brand recognition, you're at an even greater disadvantage.
In practice, advertising almost always favors entrenched players over new market entrants. Perhaps there's an exception to new market entrants from big players, but that's not nearly enough to justify the economic cost.
And then you realize that we're over-consuming, and the planet would be in a much healthier state if ads didn't exist as they do now.
Mainly a little tickle of pleasure in helping someone out combined with the pleasing puzzle solving.
Left Reddit after the whole 3rd party app shenanigans sadly.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
>For each of your apps, you must: >Respond to user questions about paid apps or in-app purchases on time: You must respond to customer support questions within three business days. If Google contacts you about an urgent product issue, you must respond within 24 hours.
Or any customer service. The support forums are worthless except for really trivial things that can be resolved equally well elsewhere.
E.g. in this case their volunteer customer service is left with this and there is no way to even know if Google sees this:
“Sorry Yeonjoong,
As a group of volunteers, we do not have access to user accounts and can only help by sharing our experiences. In this case there is nothing we can do. “